Perhaps showing us some code, would enable us to give some more detailed answers.

May we suggest the following:

• Write a minimal DBI-program (just connecting, fetching some data and disconnecting).
• Run it on a machine with mySQL local and time it.
• Then run it with mySQL on a different machine and time it again.
• Report back to Perlmonks, with your code and timings.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law